Are Apple 'stealing' Open Street Map data?
alastaira.wordpress.com
alastaira.wordpress.com
Open Street Map is very clear about attribution [http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright], and Apple has decades of experience involving aggressive IP protection.
If, however, Apple realise their mistake in a timely manner and abide by OSM's copyright, then OSM will have another happy user and can continue on with world domination.
"Assuming honest mistake" is good for long term & political goals.
What Apple did is shameful but I think what OSM is doing is most likely to promote their goals. Let others write the outraged articles.
Well then they'd be in breech of copyright, OSM data is Creative Commons licenced (CC-BY-SA) (It's due to be relicenced soon). There are well understood, legal, avenues to explore when companies breech copyright. We don't need to resort to name calling.
Not to belabor the point, but Apple explicitly refused to give credit the moment they published the App.
Despite whatever insinuations you might be making, of course OSM is pursuing their goals - goals which are utterly legitimate, legal, above board, intended to promote the general welfare and not for private profit or stockholder value.
What exactly is your idea of Apple's grand scheme? That nobody would notice they used data from OSM? That they wouldn't be called up on it?
And what would the exact benefit be of Apple taking credit for the maps? That people would go "OMG, Apple made their own maps, they are so awesome"? Apple gives credit to tons of stuff they use from Open Source projects, and contributes to many projects with people, from LLVM and Clang to MacRuby, to Webkit, to standard user-land stuff.
Here's what happened, from my 10+ year experience with following Apple. Apple used the data and didn't provide any attribution yet, but will do so in the near future, and will collaborate and improve OSM data. The reason they didn't say anything yet, is the standard veil of secrecy they use. They couldn't go ahead and talk with OSM stuff about it, probably they weren't even let to add an attribution to the iOS beta versions, so they just shipped it as it is.
Apple didn't need permission from OSM to use the data. They were not required to tell anyone about their plans to use it.
All that was required was copyright attribution in their published work.
If violating OSM's copyright carried the same financial risks as downloading illegal music, I suspect Apple's cost benefit analysis would have been different.
An army of lawyers, a huge reserve of cash, and a weak opponent unlikely to be able to vigorously pursue legal remedies led Apple to the probably correct assumption that the benefits of violating copyright outweighed the financial risks.
It is not as if the decision to drop Google maps was made by a Coop student or an intern. In a company with the sort of top down management of image that Apple employs, this was discussed at a senior level.
Which requires that the betas or at least the GM version of the OS update (all shipped to members of the developers' program) would contain the copyright attribution. So every competitor, cough Google cough, would get to know about Apple's decision to switch in advance, perhaps months in advance --maybe at the cost of an iOS developer program subscription ($99).
Have you noticed they didn't even use the latest map data, but those from mid-2010; I.e when they started, also in secrecy since no one heard anything of it, working on it?
If violating OSM's copyright carried the same financial risks as downloading illegal music, I suspect Apple's cost benefit analysis would have been different. An army of lawyers, a huge reserve of cash, and a weak opponent unlikely to be able to vigorously pursue legal remedies led Apple to the probably correct assumption that the benefits of violating copyright outweighed the financial risks.
So, spending money from "a huge reserve of cash" on a legal defense with "an army of lawyers" would help Apple avoid financial risks? Isn't spending money the financial risk in itself? How spending on lawyers is different from a fine? Did you imagine some huge fine merely from not adding an attribution as required? Whatever it could be, say 10 million dollars, it would still be pennies to Apple.
But the main problem with your logic is you haven't specified any reason for Apple to purposefully don't give attribution.
The theory of Apple wanting to take credit for the maps for itself, is ridiculous, because:
1) It's not like any consumer cares who made the mapping data.
2) It's not that Apple would have to pay to use the maps otherwise.
3) It's also not like Apple doesn't give attribution to myriads of other OS projects it uses.
4) It's also not like it was impossible that the maps would be recognised instantly by OSM contributors and people on the intertubes.
So, why exactly would Apple don't give attribution in purpose?
Only my theory, i.e secrecy, gives a reason.
[Downvoters have a better theory? Do, enlighten us...]
Nope. The OSM maps are in iPhoto for iOS, a completely new app without any outside beta testers (who would tell, anyhow).
But it is easy to imagine that no one in the team of people who carried out the technical work to get OSM data into the product told the legal department where they were getting it from, or took responsibility for making sure it got put in.
The overall result is indefensible, and Apple's senior management should have had processes in place to audit their products to make sure they comply with the legal requirements for all third-party code and data they use. However, not doing it is easily attributed to incompetence and not malice.
I guess if you are angered easily you might not understand how OSM could react that way, but please understand that just because you personally wouldn’t react that way doesn’t make it fake, not human or PR speak.
Humans really react and talk that way. It’s perfectly normal.
I wasn't responding to the whole of the OSM post, just the two excerpts that sdfjkl quoted. I saw his comment before reading the OSM post and it just didn't sound genuine to me. The amount of times I've heard "we look forward to..." in a grinfucking [1] compared to relatively light use elsewhere has made that phrase trigger my "be exceptionally wary of what comes next" alarm.
http://blog.osmfoundation.org/
though there is this:
"It’s also missing the necessary credit to OpenStreetMap’s
contributors; we look forward to working with Apple to get
that on there."
It's OSM data.
As for references of "stealing", remember don't attribute to malice what can easily be explained by incompetance.
United Kingdom: Contains Ordnance Survey data
© Crown copyright and database right 2010.
(I agree with your other points)
* Stealing is very much the wrong word here, but I don't know if this falls under copyright infringement or something else.
The article you linked to is, I think, a little misguided. If I heard "the government are killing people" I'd assume it meant "the people who make up the government have collectively decided to kill people", which is really no different to "the government is killing people". The collective decision of a group is the individual decision of the entity that group represents.
This is how most of the world does it, as far as I can tell, though in traditional Islamic law you only had business partnerships that dissolved if any of the members left.
There are various arguments against having authority reside in abstract entities rather than real people, but I hope you can see how it can be good in the case of democratic governments at least, like the City of London Corportation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation
EDIT: To be more clear, pretty much all businesses are some sort of corporation, even though most people use "Corporation" to refer to publicly traded joint stock corporations. All non-profit organizations are also corporations. Some (but by no means all) municipalities are also legally corporations, but I'm not sure exactly what the distinction between that and other forms is.
EDIT2: Reading some more in Wikipedia, I might be using the word "corporation" too loosely in the above, and there are also plane companies and partnerships that are incorporated entities but not corporations, and have the same sort of legal person hood that corporations do.
>In [British English], collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members respectively; compare 'a committee was appointed' with 'the committee were unable to agree'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...
OSM is changing to ODbL soon (since CC doesn't make a lot of sense for this sort of data)
"Title and intellectual property rights in and to any content displayed by or accessed through the Apple Software belongs to the respective content owner. Such content may be protected by copyright or other intellectual property laws and treaties, and may be subject to terms of use of the third party providing such content. Except as otherwise provided in this License, this License does not grant you any rights to use such content nor does it guarantee that such content will continue to be available to you."
Don't know what this _really_ means, though...
I'm not going to say it was malice, I really think this was discussed during development and most of the people in charge thought it wouldn't matter and nobody would care if they used OSM maps and give no credit to it.
Hopefully this was a mistake rather than Apple thinking they either didn't need to adhere to a license or that they could just bully their way to what they want.
OpenStreetMap data isn't public domain, it's copyright under a creative commons licence. There are clear rules you must obey to not be in breech of the licence.
How do you steal something given to you as a gift? Claim it was yours all along and so deny the owner their attribution. Even if the owner of the copyright retains access to the data you can still deny them their lawful attribution - that is what has arguably been stolen here I think.
Note that I put scare quotes inside of scare quotes, because I really disagree with that name. Irony quotes might be a better name, which would allow it to cover all different and separate forms of irony (sarcasm, tragedy, fate, etc).
But that's neither here nor there. The point is, "steal" is in scare quotes meaning it is using a word to express something other than its literal intention.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/breach http://www.thefreedictionary.com/breech